


all these lights, they can't blind me

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Family Drama, Female Friendship, Gen, Imaginary Friends, Imaginary Gansey, Implied Sexuality Crisis, Possibly Pre-Slash, Pre-Canon, Religion, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-18
Updated: 2017-09-18
Packaged: 2018-12-31 04:17:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12124335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: Long before Ronan understands what’s different about her family, she knows that something is. Other kids at church talk about their fathers’ office jobs and their mothers sternly standing over them as they do homework. Ronan’s father disappears for months at a time and reappears bloody and bruised, once with three broken bones that Ronan got to see before they put the cast on. The most reproving look Ronan’s mother has ever managed is mild exasperation. She doesn’t check Ronan’s bookbag for permission slips like the other moms, and Ronan is only allowed to go to the aquarium with her class because Devin already knows how to forge both parents’ signatures.





	all these lights, they can't blind me

**Author's Note:**

> I was going for the imaginary-friend-made-real trope (is this a trope? does anyone do this?) and Gansey was going to return in a blaze of polo-shirted glory but frankly I just lost steam and decided to cap it at what felt like a pretty natural endpoint. Ronan's childhood was canonically very isolated and Barns-centric and I wanted her to have a friend without changing that. Also maybe Gansey is actually a ghost? She might have died when she was stung and then moved into Ronan's head.

Long before Ronan understands what’s different about her family, she knows that something is. Other kids at church talk about their fathers’ office jobs and their mothers sternly standing over them as they do homework. Ronan’s father disappears for months at a time and reappears bloody and bruised, once with three broken bones that Ronan got to see before they put the cast on. The most reproving look Ronan’s mother has ever managed is mild exasperation. She doesn’t check Ronan’s bookbag for permission slips like the other moms, and Ronan is only allowed to go to the aquarium with her class because Devin already knows how to forge both parents’ signatures.

She meets Gansey in the forest, looking very out of place but not at all lost. She’s staring up into a tree, a notepad in one hand and a stub of a pencil in the other. She has chosen the least interesting tree for miles; it neither speaks nor harbors animals that do. Ronan watches from a distance as she tests a handhold, using it to haul herself into the air before her grip weakens and she comes crashing back down. She tries this several more times, never making more than a couple feet of progress. It’s difficult to watch, but Ronan does, for what must be hours.

Shyness doesn’t come naturally to Ronan, so it annoys her to be made to feel it now, in a place that has always been so firmly hers. She lets that frustration propel her into an introduction, slipping from behind her tree. “You’re never going to make it if you keep hesitating,” she says, and pulls herself up easily.

Gansey doesn’t seem surprised, which would make sense, or impressed, which Ronan would have liked. She does step back and watch, taking careful notes as Ronan dismounts and climbs again. Gansey is sweaty and disheveled by the time she finally joins Ronan on the lowest branch, a streak of dirt on one cheek and a scrape spanning her forehead. She plucks a bright green flower and an eight-sided leaf that’s halfway to autumnal, pressing them in the pages of her notebook.

Emotions run hot in the Lynch household, but spending time with Gansey is like being submerged in the lake’s cool, blue depths, or days when the temperature and humidity are just right, when Ronan’s edges blur perfectly into the world around her. Spending time with Gansey is like nothing, like disappearing.  Sometimes they talk about Ronan’s family, her father who isn’t around and her mother who is but not quite. Just as often, they lie in the grass together in total silence, or Ronan shows Gansey the forest’s secrets while Gansey takes notes and produces poor sketches of birds’ nests suspended in thin air. She won’t explain what she’s doing in the woods beyond “exploring,” which is annoying but less than it would be coming from anyone else.

Ronan visits Gansey on Saturdays, and on Sundays, she sits with her family in their regular pew, her head bowed between her sisters’ near-identical ones, and feels less and less like she belongs. She cherishes the familiar rhythm of Confession, the lightness of unburdening, but it’s nothing compared to her time in the forest. This is one of the things she confesses, over and over, without knowing whether she ought to.

Ronan tells Gansey things she can’t tell anyone else, not because they’re secrets, though they are, but because everyone else already knows. Her entire life is the Barns, the world her father created for them. Martha has friends in her class, girls whose houses she goes to and who are very rarely allowed to come marvel at the Barns’ more mundane oddities, and Devin discovers boys early, at least by Ronan’s estimation, and spends her weekends at the mall or the movies with a never-ending parade of acne-ridden boys. Ronan didn’t see the point of making friends when she was younger, and now it’s too late, all the girls in her grade calcified into cliques.

Ronan doesn’t realize that Gansey isn’t real until she tries to bring her home, so excited to show off that she can’t be distracted by the trees waving to her. She’s saying, “You can meet my mom and my dad and—” and she wakes up tangled in her bedsheets, alone but for the remembered feeling of Gansey’s wrist, warm and real, under her fingers. It should have been obvious, she thinks, considering that she would spend all day in school or in one of the Barns’ many warm, sunlit meadows, and then lie down and wake up in the forest, the perpetual noon sun filtering through the leaves. In her defense, Gansey is so blandly proper that she doesn’t seem imaginary at all. Most of Ronan’s dreams are fantastical, centaurs with unicorn horns, plants that tell secrets like where her mom hides the extra cookies and the best fishing spot on their lake, the one that isn’t on any maps. Gansey has her hair cut into a severe-looking bob and is always wearing a pollen-stained cardigan with a notepad jammed into one of the pockets. Her penny loafers are more worn down every time Ronan sees her, the right one turning in at the ankle, like she really has been wandering the forest when Ronan isn’t around.

Once Ronan is over the immediate disappointment, the revelation that she can never merge her two worlds, it strikes her as a blessing. Gansey will never meet her family and be disappointing, or disappointed. She will never slip up and reveal one of Ronan’s secrets, or meet someone she likes better. She will just be, whenever Ronan needs her.

Niall likes to hear about her dreams, more than Devin’s or Martha’s, and she doesn’t quite know why but knows that she feels special, that the loss of these moments would kill her. She talks around Gansey for as long as she can, but the person-sized hole leaves her dreams flat, incoherent. He comes back from a trip and doesn’t ask what she dreamed while he was gone, for the very first time, and so she volunteers the truth, telling him about Gansey and her search for something Ronan doesn’t understand. This draws him in, especially when she tells him that Gansey is smart and incisive and nothing at all like the kind of person Ronan would have thought she wanted to be friends with. Intoxicated by his focus on her, she slips between worlds for a moment, forgets who exists in which, says that she’d like him to meet her.

Devin rolls her eyes from across the kitchen table. “He _can’t_ meet her because she isn’t _real_ , dummy. What are you, five?”

Breakfast ends as it often has since Devin and Ronan got old enough for a decent rivalry, with the table tipped on its side and Ronan trying to yank Devin’s hair out.

But Devin is right, and Ronan knows it, after determinedly not knowing for so long. The next few times she dreams of the forest, she listens hard for the sound of Gansey’s steps, clumsy in loafers, and makes a point of going the other way, feeling hunted even though Gansey wouldn’t be able to catch up to her in the actual forest, let alone the one in Ronan’s mind, where the arboreal tripwires work only in her favor.

One night, she doesn’t hear Gansey at all, and tries very hard not to feel abandoned. She asks her father if dreams can die, thinking of Gansey’s allergy, and he takes her question very seriously, and asks if he can get back to her. She wants to say no, but she’s never denied him anything, so she nods and tries not to look like she’s going to cry, and just barely doesn’t when he calls her in the middle of a three-month trip on a crackling unfamiliar phone line and says his answer is, “I hope not.” She dreams for months of a forest full of a dull buzzing, and is grateful Gansey knows to stay away.

She moves on, more or less, as the years go by. Gansey was, after all, a figment of her imagination, her subconscious saying what she couldn’t bring herself to admit. A diary isn’t quite the same though, not least because she suspects Devin of reading it. Gansey never would have fit in with the Lynches, so it didn’t bother her that Ronan sometimes didn’t either. She tries a couple times, when she’s fifteen and desperate for the opinion of someone who isn’t her family or her priest, to dream Gansey back to life, but she never comes, no matter how long Ronan waits, no matter how carefully she maps out her burned-in memories of Gansey before she falls asleep.


End file.
